The present invention relates to detecting vascular landmarks in computed tomography (CT) volumes.
Accurate placement of vascular landmarks inside the vessel lumen is an important prerequisite to automatic centerline tracing. Although various methods are implemented to determine the location of organ landmarks, several challenges remain for determining the location of vascular landmarks.
Ensuring that the vascular landmarks are placed inside the lumen is challenging when the vessel itself is narrow. Additionally, contrast-enhanced arteries may be tightly surrounded with bones having similar intensity profiles, making detection difficult in comparison with arteries surrounded by darker tissues. Vascular landmarks that are not located at vessel bifurcations may also be difficult to locate since they can be ill-defined due to the high uncertainty of their position. As stated, accurate detection of these vascular landmarks is an important prerequisite to automatic centerline tracing methods requiring humans or machines to indicate start and/or end points of a vessel that is to be traced.